The Franklin Tree of the Explorers Garden

There is no wild Franklinia anywhere on earth and there has not been for about two hundred years. John Bartram found the species growing on a few acres beside the Altamaha River in Georgia in 1765, his son William collected seed around 1776, and within roughly fifty years the wild population was gone and never seen again. Every Franklin tree alive today, in every garden in the world, descends from that one collection. This is one of the oldest of them. The Arnold Arboretum took it in as a rooted cutting in 1905 from a Pennsylvania nursery, on a line traceable back to material from 1884. The International Dendrology Society, which has no stake in Harvard's reputation, calls it the largest and oldest known example of the species anywhere, and photographed it standing in October 2025. It is a small tree in the tea family and the only member of its genus, and it flowers on an odd schedule. Large cream white flowers with a boss of yellow stamens open late in the season, so the last of them are still out while the leaves around them are turning red. Seeing both at once on the same branch is the reason to come. It grows in the Explorers Garden on Bussey Hill. No coordinates are published for the individual plant, so the pin is the garden and the labels there take you the rest of the way.